These Eye Drops Can Treat Cataract Without A Surgery

Almost all of us, with the exception
of a few, take our vision for granted. We stay up late and use our handheld
devices or laptops in bed without giving any attention to what it is doing to
our eyes. However, there are many people who struggle with vision every day,
and according to a report, more than 285 million people in the world suffer
from vision problems, and a huge part of them suffer from cataracts.

As per the Fred Hollows Foundation,
about 32.4 million people in the world are blind, and more than 50% of them are
blind because of cataracts. The only treatment for cataracts is surgery, and it
doesn’t help that most of our patients are in developing countries. This makes
it quite difficult for these patients to get treatment for cataracts. Good news
is that a team of researchers in the US has managed to develop a drug that can
be administered using an eyedropper and is capable of dissolving cataracts.

But despite the promising future that
the treatment holds, it has yet to be tested on humans. It is scheduled to
enter the clinical trials; however, strict regulations have been put in place
to make sure that there are no adverse side effects of the treatment. This implies
that there is still some time before the treatment is readily available as an
alternative to surgery.

Cataracts are formed because of the
structure of our the crystallin proteins that constitute the lens in our eyes.
They are formed when this structure is damaged, thus causing the proteins to
get clumped together. This creates a layer, milky, over the eye that hampers
the vision. The new treatment was developed based on a steroid that forms
naturally and is called ‘lanosterol’.

The team came across two siblings
that had cataracts, whereas their parents did not suffer from it. The said
siblings had a mutual mutation that had ceased the lanosterol production while
the parents didn’t have this mutation. This led the scientists to believe that
maybe the lack of production of lanosterol is the reason the siblings are
suffering from cataracts. Scientists tested the theory on thirteen rabbits, and
within a week, all but two of them had gone from suffering from severe
cataracts to mild or no cataracts at all. The drug has been tested on dogs as
well with similar results.

Ruben Abagyan, the co-author of the
paper, said, ‘I think the natural next step is looking to translate it into
humans. There’s nothing more exciting than that.’